A short review

A short review

I have a 1st gen Ipod Touch and I recently heard about the Tree to Go app so here’s my short review.

So I went to the app site on my Touch and downloaded the app, it installed quickly and didn’t take very long to start. It’s a very clean looking app that uses the same color scheme as Ancestry and FTM. A logon screen initially came up and after entering my info, it wouldn’t allow me to log on. Tried half a dozen times, went to Ancestry.com to make sure I wasn’t being forgetful, restarted the Touch, tried everything but it kept giving me an error message. Finally I uninstalled then reinstalled the app…then it decided to work the first time.

So the next screen to come up was a list of your trees on Ancestry.com, I selected my tree and a status bar came up showing the progress of the download, I have about 400 people in my tree and it took less than 30 seconds to download (my wifi is on a cable connection).

What came up next was pretty disappointing. There is a simply a list of the people in your tree in alphabetical order, it looked very much like the music playlist on your Ipod. From there you can view/edit/add parents and children but all on a very basic level. I can see if you have an Iphone (or have photos on your device) you can take photos and add them but as someone who does most of his work on FTM this doesn’t help at all.

And that’s pretty much it, you have a searchable list of names that you can modify the basic details of and sync back to Ancestry. That’s not what I would have liked for this app. If I’m going to a relative’s house and ask a few questions about the family, I’m going to use the notes app that came with the Touch, then I’m going to go home and enter in the info. They should have created an actual graphical tree so I could use this for what it would have an excellent use for, showing your tree off to friends and family. That would have paired up excellent with the touch screen, for what they used it for you might as well use a scroll/click wheel.

What would also be awesome is if they updated Family Tree Maker to be able to function as a content server so that an Iphone/Touch would be able to download date from your computer. One of my favorite ebook sorting programs, Calibre, can do this with an app called Stanza so that I can download the books on my computer to my Touch. Calibre was written by one guy in his basement so I’m sure Ancestry can do better.